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I'm having a play, creating some sort of "Northern Romance" branch using the Germanic sound changes on Latin, and tweaking it a bit in different ways (yes, I know it's been done before, but not by *me* - and i'm enjoying it !). I'm still just sorting out the phonology into some kind of "master plan" before I start looking into the grammar, but the emerging phonology has had me thinking about the orthography I'm going to eventually need so people can get their pens around my linguistic meddling. I've run a few nouns through the mill to see what comes out, and then transcribed the phonetics as best as possible using something like standard German orthography (which seems suitable enough for now, although the results look a little odd). Thing is, I can't imagine how best to transcribe a word-initial velar fricative (other than the Swiss <kch_>, which just looks too non-roman) - and I have plenty of them. In other positions I used <ch>, which seems fine to me (not too far away for example fom the French <ch> for /S/). I've thought of maybe <c>, or <c-cedilla>, or even <hch> (c.f. German <sch> and <tsch>), but they don't quite seem to fit. Maybe just use <ch> in initial position too, althouh that looks 'wrong' to me. Does anyone have any idea how those poor mediaeval monks, schooled in classical latin, might have tried to write an initial /x/ ? And then that led me to wondering to what extent the romance languages' orthographies tend towards being conservative, (in preserving the original latin to some extent or another). Pronununciation in Castillian has moved quite some way from latin, but the orthography is much more 'latin-conservative' than say, Italian, which while perhaps phonologically closer to latin, has changed it's spelling a lot (e.g. Castillian <qué> vs italian <che>). What are your thoughts? Stamp your mark on the nascent Northern Romance languages! Should they be more latin looking, or more germanic!? Pete. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]